Just keep things in perspective: BoingBoping :: Daily Show on the housing crisis: Why can't Geithner sell his house?
Hurrah! I've been offered a job with the University of Michigan. The salary is 35% less than what I had before, but it's (barely) enough to buy a small house in the current economic conditions - if I can swing a mortgage. I haven't actually started work yet, but I'm shaking the rust off my house-hunting skills and trying again. I'm looking for a 3 bedroom 1.1(+) bath house with basement in the Skyline High School area (north-west side of Ann Arbor.) A garage (electrified) would be thrilling as it would allow me to pursue a side business of furniture repair during winter months.
The demise of the Ann Arbor News this summer is going to make searching for open houses somewhat more difficult, especially FSBO open houses (are there such things?)
Presently, being unemployed, and with the greatest economic meltdown occuring since the Great Depression, I am not looking for a house.
I never did buy a house — the money I was saving for a down payment has gone to living while I'm looking for a job. Unfortunately, I still have strong reasons to be bound to Ann Arbor. These links haven't been verified for a long time, most likely March 2007 was the last time any of them were checked.
I can't say I'm happy that I rightly viewed housing prices as being inflated. I'd rather there wasn't such an economic disaster.
The Ann Arbor/Washtenaw County area property market is highly priced. The Ann Arbor News recently (June 19 through June 26, 2005) ran a series of articles about housing in this area. This series seemed confident that the expansion of the housing market and rapid rise in housing prices would continue.
On the other hand, a recent Economist cover article showed a brick labeled House Prices falling from the sky. The Economist argues that there is a world wide housing bubble, much like the Dot Com bubble of the late 1990's, and this bubble would suffer a similar fate. However, since the Dot Com bubble was largely made up of fanciful promisses and paper companies, and since housing represents real property, the fate of the housing market won't be an 80% loss of value, but rather (in some places) a 30% loss, or perhaps stagnant housing prices for a decade (such as Japan suffered throughout the 1990s.)
Falling prices, or stagnant prices.. either one is bad for someone whose current livelyhood is ultimately dependant on how much money state supported educational instutitions can receive from the government; where at the (US) state level, state governments are retrenching, and where at the federal level, a huge deficit is being run. I fear another round of inflation and stagnation, much as hit the US while I was a youngster in the 1970s.
What a wonderful time to be buying a house.
I have five general categories of information for researching houses on the market. They are:
In addition, I have a section about economic news that might affect the real estate market.
In addition, the Michigan Public Sex Offender Registry can be consulted, even though it the data in it isn't reliable. An even more unreliable compendium of such data is National Sex Offender Registry. This site presents the information with such nice maps that if you were unfamiliar with the area, you might not realize that a certain offender was living in the middle of a golf course.
Michigan law requires that property tax information be made public and accessible. Most governmental units have elected to make this information available on the World Wide Web. Privacy issues aside, it's a great resource for getting a sense of a location. Some jurisdictions will give extensive detail, including tax history, pictures, sketches, permits, and ownership history. Others maintain minimal information. All of the jurisdictions within Washtenaw County have to report to Washtenaw County, and there is a Parcel ID system (I suppose state-wide) that identifies saleable properties. In areas where the jurisdiction isn't obvious from other resources, the county web site can find the parcel and the jurisdiction. You can then use the appropriate jurisdictional website to find further details.
If there is a jurisdictional web site. Many of the townships that are pride themselves on low taxes and small government don't have websites, and given the current funding issue with Washtenaw County Sheriff deputy coverage of those townships, it seems unlikely that they'll make that information available when they're struggling to fund police protection.
The following information was harvested from the
Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors web page,
a nasty piece of HTML frames if there ever was one. Each government
unit will open into it's own page. That means that both the City of
Ann Arbor site and the City of Ann Arbor Property Tax site will
open into the same (new) page, and that the Ann Arbor Township pages will
open in different ones.
The advantage of using Licensed Realtors is that they're bound by laws, rules, and contracts. You should be able to expect a certain minimal professionalism from them. And they help the seller fill out the disclosure statement (nod-nod, wink-wink.) (Of course, the seller may be lying or willfully ignorant. For instance, for any house built before the mid-1970s, there is going to be lead paint somewhere, unless the extremely expensive process of lead abatement is done.)
Of course, that said, when a licensed Realtor is showing you a house being sold to dispose of the estate of a deceased (or deranged) person, or a house forclosed by a bank or other mortgage holder, that advantage largely disappears. In that case, the seller knows nothing but at least they're not lying.
One special advantage Licensed Realtors have is their involvement with the Multiple Listing Service (or MLS.) A selling realtor can delay listing a property, have (somewhat) advance notice of a property being sold. They also have their own (private) access to the MLS that allows them to perform exact searches of the MLS data.
That said, a lot of the data you or I might want to search the MLS for is erraticly encoded, resisting most efforts to search. I've encountered the same house listed multiple times, incorrect prices (beware of rental prices masqueradeing as selling prices), bogus square footage, etc. To a minor extent, you can count on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. However, sometimes a room may be classified as a bedroom and sometimes as a study. Also, due the difference between a full bathroom (commode, sink, bathtub or shower), and a half-bath (commode and sink), and other partial bathrooms (commode only, or sink and shower, etc.) there is often some difference between the way different realtors enter this number.
For instance, a full-bath and a half-bath may be encoded as 1.5 or 1.1. Worse, two half-bath's may be encoded as 1.2, which casts some doubt on what 1.5 might mean (although, unless the building was some kind of dormitory or rooming house, it is very unlikely that there would be 5 half-baths!)
When it comes to garages, basements, kitches, style, siding, etc... you might be able to count on the presence, but not necessarily the utility. Various abbreviations exist. The lack of a basement might be hinted at by an indication of SLA (or SLAB) for the basement or somewhere else. Or it might be neglected entirely, all at the whim, convenience, skill, distractibility, and laziness of the selling realtor.
Finally, some (nationwide) chains seem to use web-site software that excludes non-Internet Explorer browsers. Frankly, if I can't use their website from Firefox or Safari, then I won't bother with them. I'm also using AddBlocker and NoScript in Firefox and I'm aggressive about blocking whole networks and DNS domains in my home network on the slightests suspicion of malware or overly obnoxious tracking.
In Ann Arbor, I've found the best access to the MLS is through the Edward Surovell website. See below for more details.
| Realtor | MLS Access | Benefits | Drawbacks | Update |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edward Surovell | www.surovell.com/ listings/AtlasSearch.php?chome=1& |
Website upgraded, late Nov 2005. Now has little mortgage calculator (that I'm not sure I trust yet.) | Unable to search except by city, price, bedrooms and bathrooms.
i.e.: No search by address or partial address, no search by proximity to an existing address, location, or landmark. |
Dec 2, 2005 |
| Charles Reinhart | reinhartrealtors.com/ System/ListingSearch.asp |
Offers search by street | ||
| Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors | www.aaabor.com/ property_search.cfm |
|||
| Keller Williams Ann Arbor | annarbor.yourkwoffice.com/ property_search |
Nasty corporate site to navigate. Doesn't play nicely with Mozilla (when multiple pages of a search come up, it is impossible to see subsequent pages.) | Jan 17, 2006 | |
| Coldwell Banker Schweitzer | www.cbschweitzer.com/ | Offers search by street name | ||
| Coldwell Banker | www.coldwellbanker.com/ | Frames from hell | ||
|
Rion Team |
|
Now some website in Seattle, OR. Useless for Ann Arbor real estate. |
May 9, 2009 Jan 17, 2006 |
|
| Real Estate One ClickAnnArbor.Com |
www.clickannarbor.com/ | |||
|
|
|
|
Jan 17, 2006 | |
| RE/Max Ann Arbor | www.homesinwashtenaw.com/ | Flash animations | ||
| RE/Max | remax.realtor.com/ FindHome/defaultREMAX.asp? gate=remax&poe=realtor |
Generic realtors.com website. | ||
| Century 21 | www.century21.com/ meet/office_detail.aspx? office_key=10003449 |
|||
Regretabbly, the Ann Arbor News will cease publication July 26 of 2009.
The Ann Arbor News Sunday Real Estate section is a great help. The listing of open houses by the various realtors in the area, as well as listings of For Sale By Owners (FSBOs) is pretty usefull. You can visit four (4) to seven (7) properties during the typical Open House period of Sunday Afternoon from noon (12:00) to five (5:00pm).
For Sale By Owner's are a nuisance. A lot of FSBO's set up their own web page using a web-hosting service. There are some FSBO companies that list FSBO's too, but the accuracy of the data can be suspect. I doubt that the FSBO companies send out someone to check the data entered, and I've seen the same property listed multiple times on the same FSBO site.
Mapquest makes finding places in the Ann Arbor area fairly easy, although be careful of entering the township name instead of the city name. Lodi Michigan (a village or city in south-west lower Michigan) is not Lodi Township.
A few news articles about the state of the economy and how it might affect home prices, mortgages, etc.
At a "How to buy your first home" class, the most usefull and practical information came from a house inspector. (The mortgage broker and realtor just said that everything was changing due to the current (May 2009) real estate and mortgage crisis.)
The most memorable thing this fellow said was to watch out for More-On houses - houses where more additions have been added on to the original structure. The reason for the concern is that the additions can compromise the original basements and foundations, roofs, weather seal of the house, and so on. Also, the heating and air-conditioning of more-on houses can be compromised as well, if existing ductwork is extended (rather than new ductwork added). Also, more-on work can block access to crawl spaces, or create crawl spaces. (Crawl spaces are bad in and of themselves because they make it harder to discover problems developing in the plumbing and electrical systems.)
My list of concerns about more-on houses includes:
The following features that home owners have added to a home as an improvement I consider to be liabilities - either for safety, maintenance, or disaster recovery issues.
Sometimes, a liability is situational. I watch for the following situational liabilities:
Corrosion is never good and is usually bad. It usually indicates a situation where two metals (copper & iron/steel) come into direct contact with each other, such as an iron/steel pipe hanger being used to support a copper pipe, or where a foolish homeowner has directly connected galvanized (iron/steel) pipe with copper pipe.
All-copper plumbing is probably the best, but old copper plumbing was probably joined with lead solder. If you suspect lead-soldered pipes, you should probably flush the water system whenever it has been left idle for "too long" - more than a couple days is my off-hand guess.
Older houses might have a mix of galvanized, copper, and PVC water supply plumbing. I'm not entirely confident that PVC plumbing doesn't leach "something nasty", much like lead solder. Back in the late 70's, early 80's, there was a big hullabaloo about a certain kind of PVC pipe that broke down & caused flooding. Anytime that galvanized pipe and copper pipe is mixed, there is a risk that there might be a bi-metal junction that could cause corrosion. This can be avoided by using brass in between the copper and galvanized pipe, but a handy-man home-owner do-it-yourselfer might not have known that.
The usual stuff here. Look for water damage. Look for mold. Look for cracks in the foundation walls. Look for bowing of the wall (the flashlight comes in handy here, as does a second person.)
Basement electrical outlets should be GFI'd. Permanently installed
appliances (such as washers, dryers, spare freezers) should have dedicated (& GFI'd) outlents.
If there's a set of outlets low to the basement floor (below 4 feet up), the entire circuit should
be GFI'd. A reasonably handy homeowner can replace individual outlets with GFI'd outlets, but GFI'ing
an entire circuit should be undertaken by an electrician, unless the homeowner can identify a
reasonable spot where a GFI outlet can be installed in series with the low circuit in a safe location.
Remember the marble in the toolkit? Here's where you get to play with it!
Check for the following:
A nice, modern, highly effecient furnace can be a wonderful thing... if it's installed correctly. In an older house, the chimney for the original furnace was designed for a nasty, ineffecient monster (and probably a hot-water heater too.) When a modern, high effeciency furnace is installed, a chimney liner (flexible pipe) should be installed too to reduce the diameter of the chimney. If the old chimney is used without reducing the diameter, the flow of gasses up the chimney will not be enough to prevent condensation (one of the products of combustion of hydrocarbons) from accumulating in the chimney, causing decay, etc. other nastiness.
A chimney liner is likely to be indicated by a "newish" (shiny) new pipe cap sticking up out of the furnace chimney. (Remember - the furnace/hot water heater chimney is kept seperate from any fireplace chimneys.)
The following is a list of legal protections I have found in regards to buying a home. (I haven't sold one yet - no advice there.)